Recently, the political interwoobs have coalesced into two distinct camps of thought with respect to the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination campaign. These thoughts are “Mitt Romney is going to win it eventually because nobody else can” and “Mitt Romney cannot win it because the base hates him.”

The pro-Romney argument (inasmuch as any of these arguments can be called “pro-Romney,” because most of the people advancing it don’t actually think that highly of Romney beyond “well, he’s not insane, I suppose”) is simple: the party elites are coalescing around Romney for lack of a better option so he will have the most money and, as in 2008, will be able to go the distance for as long as he thinks he can win, and Romney knows this is his last kick at the can because the GOP is not going to get more moderate any time soon. And to be fair to Romney, it’s not a terrible argument. He’s got about twenty to twenty-five percent of the primary vote, making him a leading candidate.

But I am more inclined towards the anti-Romney argument, based simply on polling numbers. With the exception of the Rasmussen poll which we can say is an outlier, Romney has never gotten more than 25% support in a poll. We have seen Michelle Bachmann and Donald Trump and Rick Perry and now Herman Cain all top the polls and Romney has consistently been in second or third place. It doesn’t matter what happens: as each of these potential candidates implodes because they are crazy or inept or choose not to run, their support evaporates, but Romney gets none of it as the disenchanted GOP base abandons their hopes for Candidate A and moves on to whomever is next. (At this point, when Cain inevitably fucks up – and he’s come close a couple of times – I think they’re left with Rick Santorum.) These people simply do not want to vote for Mitt Romney.1

If you look at it like this, then Mitt Romney cannot win the nomination. If his support within the party is capped at 30% (and that appears to be on the generous side even if you include everybody still quixotically supporting Jon Huntsman), what has to happen for him to win is that the remainder of the vote has to be split at least three ways and preferably four for the majority of the campaign. But that’s not going to happen: candidates will drop out as they start running out of money, and those candidates’ support will bleed to other not-Romneys. At some point, and probably before Super Tuesday, a not-Romney will have more support than Romney does. At that point, Romney loses.

The response to this argument is “Rudy Guiliani John McCain 2008 nobody knows anything!” And it’s true: politics is weird sometimes, and nobody knows anything for sure, and Mitt Romney has a ton of money behind him and money can do a lot of things, and yes, John McCain won the nomination in 2008 with worse poll numbers at a comparable point than Romney has now. But McCain’s field was different: there was no presumptive anti-McCain movement in the base, and McCain won two of four of the “first four” states including an extremely conservative one (South Carolina) and a fairly moderate one (New Hampshire), making him all things to all people, and in 2008 the GOP base was less conservative than it was now.

And if you assume that whichever Republican wins Iowa will have an advantage in the following primaries, which they probably will, then that is bad for Mitt Romney because Mitt Romney is not going to win Iowa – he’s skipping the state and starting his campaign in New Hampshire, where he can win. The not-Romney that wins Iowa will drain support from the other not-Romneys,2 and stand an excellent chance of winning South Carolina (another early state in which Romney will probably do poorly), and if they win both will become the presumptive not-Romney. And Mitt Romney can’t win if there is a single triumphant not-Romney, because the GOP base doesn’t want to vote for him.

1. This of course does not count the Ron Paul vote, but the Ron Paul vote isn’t going to vote for Mitt either. [↩]
2. Unless Ron Paul wins Iowa, in which case who the fuck knows. [↩]

Recently there’s been a lot saying of things like “Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party have a lot in common because they’re both angry at how society has been declining and they are both frustrated by their increased inability to effect real change, so they should get together and talk stuff over.” I consider this to be an excellent example of how people can, from facts which are quite true, arrive at a premise which is utterly wrong.

The true part is that both movements are angry at their perception of society’s decline and that both are frustrated by their perceived inability to effect change. Of course, perception is not equal in all cases. Both sides accurately see that American society is entering a decline; how they perceive that decline, though, is what creates their personal narrative. Occupy Wall Street sees the decline as something happening to them. The Tea Party mostly sees the decline as something happening to other people. This is part of the reason OWS’s narrative is aggressive and the Tea Party’s is defensive. (Some might say that the Tea Party is aggressive, but that’s more about tone than goals. Their goals are defensive: stop the illegal immigrants from coming in, stop spending my tax money on other people, stop expanding healthcare because it ruins my Medicare, et cetera.)

This is the core reason why OWS and the Tea Party can’t band together. The Tea Party looks at OWS and sees them as either a symptom of what’s wrong with the country (“elites working to give those hippies my stuff”) or actually what’s wrong with the country (“those hippies tell the elites what to do!”). OWS looks at the Tea Party as either running an unknowing defensive action for corporate America (“why are they arguing we shouldn’t do things which should benefit everybody?”) or actively being willing tools of the regime (“the Koch brothers pay their salaries to protest”).

In other words, these are people who can never be allies, and it’s not just because of media narratives. It’s because, not saying whether one side is right or wrong, each side believes the other side is to blame for all of this.

(oh, who are we kidding: the Tea Partiers are wrong.)

My election post-mortem is up at Torontoist, along with the election liveblog from last night.

Torontoist’s provincial election endorsement – most of which I wrote – is up for you to read. It is, perhaps, somewhat predictable, but you have to admit that Torontoist didn’t just let me write “FUCK TIM HUDAK” one thousand times in a row. Which was tempting.

Kevin Drum is enthused that California has joined the National Popular Vote movement, and my question is: why?

I’m not asking “why does he support the National Popular Vote.” I agree with him that a national popular vote, assigning each state’s electors by percentage of votes to each party, is a much better and fairer way to assign electors to the Electoral College than the current winner-in-each-state-takes-all system, since it’s both more reflective of the populace’s desires and it also means that Presidential candidates can’t skip campaigning in their “solid” states. It ends the swing-state phenomenon. This is good.

But the NPV movement is going about it in a stupid way: they’ve decided to round of 270 electoral votes’ worth of states and, when they hit that number, they agree to all commit to popular-vote elector assignment. This sounds nice in theory, but right now, at about the halfway mark (132 electoral votes), they’ve signed up California, Vermont, Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Washington and the District of Columbia.

What do all of these states (well, and D.C.) have in common? Not a one of them has gone to the Republicans since 1988. These are blue states, every one. And the problem with NPV is that if only liberal states are going to jump on the bandwagon, you’re basically saying that the only candidates electable to national office will be Republicans – since Republicans will get all of the electoral votes from their “safe” states in the Deep South and the plains, and then snag all the additional votes in blue states that they weren’t previously getting.

This is a recipe for electoral disaster for liberals in America – and liberals in America didn’t exactly have it easy to begin with. I understand and agree that, generally speaking, the national popular vote is a movement favoring good governance – but if only one side cares about it, the other side can take exceptional advantage of it.

EDIT: So apparently the National Popular Vote isn’t a proportional allotment of electors, making this entire post pointless! Just pretend it is about unicorns or something instead. You like unicorns, right?

Over at Torontoist, I dueled with Patrick Metzger over the issue of allowing corporate advertising inside of schools.

Image blatantly looted from the always excellent flashboy

It’s been a while since I exercised my guest-blogger privileges here. I figured that since I was on the scene, I might write a bit about the shit that’s currently going down in my town– although my neighbourhood, Lambeth, is fairly quiet so far.

I am only an adopted Londoner, but I’ve inhaled enough urban grime to have acquired a certain patina of Londonness for my soul. One of the characteristics of the species is that we do not let shit faze us. In times of crisis, a Londoner feels an instantaneous connection to the survivors of the Blitz. Our shoulders square, our bosom swells, our accent becomes ten degrees more clipped, and suddenly you could use our upper lip as a backboard to practise your Wimbledon serve.

To be honest, the unflappability of the current generation probably has more to do with the plethora of attacks by various Irish maniacs during the Troubles, which carried on intermittently into the mid-’90s (long enough for even a late arrival like me to become blasé). Still, when the July 7th bombs went off in ’05, we went straight into Blitz mode. Out into the street we strolled with a generalised air of “Terror? No, sirs; it’s been tried before by bigger bastards than you.”

(We’re kind of like Captain America in that respect. Our comeback to everyone, up to and including Galactus, is “Oh yeah? Well, I fought Nazis. And won, so there. Nazis, dude.”)

But then there’s the other Britain. If we’re Five Go Mad In Dorset, we’re also Mr Jolly Lives Next Door. (First link rife with overstated tweeness; second link definitely NSFAnyone.)
continue reading "London’s burning"

I’m impressed: he’s amazingly intelligent and eloquent when provided a stupid question or assertion from which to work, and he only swears twice. I would have trouble stopping at a dozen swears, honestly.

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about how important it is to keep taxes low on the rich. Not, as we all might suspect, because all the Congressmen saying it have taken somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred grand in “campaign contributions” from very rich people who generally don’t tend to part with money unless they think they’ll get something out of it; instead, it is because these people are the “job creators” who drive the economy and if they have to spend all their money in taxes then they won’t be able to spend any on creating jobs.

Now, one might…one just might…point out that we’ve been cutting taxes on the rich for the last decade and all we’ve gotten to show for it is a net loss of five million jobs and a small group of very rich people who have gotten much, much richer…but instead, I think we should take all these people at their word. I think that we should treat these people as the job creators they really are, just like the Republicans in Congress say. And to that end, I think we should do exactly what the Republicans insist is the best solution for the economy, the best solution for just about anything. Let’s let the free market handle it.

Specifically, I think we should tie the top income tax rate to the unemployment rate. Say, a baseline tax rate of twenty-five percent, with a baseline unemployment rate of five percent. Every percentage point below that, the top tax rate decreases by thirteen percent (down to a minimum of one percent, a purely token rate.) And of course, every percentage point the unemployment rate goes up above five, the top tax rate increases by thirteen percent (up to a maximum of ninety-nine percent; after all, nobody should be denied the right to make a living.)

Naturally, the specific numbers could be haggled a bit, the tax loopholes closed here and there to make sure that they’re not shirking their duties as job creators, the exact unemployment figures that we use to calculate this tax rate precisely detailed to avoid fraud. But in theory, this should be exactly what the nation’s captains of industry want. They have an incentive to put the nation’s unemployed back to work, we have a way to balance the budget in times of economic stress, and the Republicans get to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to free-market economics and their worship of America’s ultra-wealthy as the people who make America great.

I don’t know why, but something tells me they won’t go for it…

In a recent tweet, Michelle Bachmann’s campaign wrote:

Lesson in economic recovery: Consider Canada. No stimulus & unemployment is 20% lower than US.

Uh, guys – we did have a stimulus. We passed stimulus in 2009 as part of the budget, at practically the same time that the USA did: $40 billion in spending and $20 billion in tax cuts for a total of $60 billion in stimulus spending and cuts. Now, our budget was only $274 billion CDN in expenditures, so that $60 billion represented about 22% of our overall budget, whereas the USA’s stimulus of $900 billion measured against its expenditures of $3.5 trillion USD represented about 26% of its budget, so percentagewise our stimulus was a bit smaller than yours, granted – but then again, thanks to strict banking regulations that most of the world didn’t have, we didn’t take nearly the hit that the United States did from the financial collapse of 2008.

So basically Michelle Bachmann is wrong. I know, you’re having trouble processing such an idea! But that is in fact the case.

Income splitting was one of the policy proposals that the Conservatives ran on in the recent election. I think it’s a bad idea – a well-intentioned bad idea, but a bad idea nonetheless. But it’s also a policy that a lot of people I spoke with prior to the election had no idea was even being considered, so I think it’s also worthwhile to discuss it.

Income splitting is sometimes called “joint filing” (certainly it’s called that in the United States, one of the few countries to have it). It’s a fairly simple concept: if you’re married, you can take your income and your spouse’s income, add them together, and then each of you declares half of that total as your income on your tax return. Pretty straightforward.

The Tories pushed income splitting as being a “pro-family” policy, though, and I don’t think it qualifies. It’s certainly a tax policy that especially benefits a certain type of family – namely, your traditional two-parent single-income family, where the single earner making, say, $70,000 annually doesn’t pay taxes on a 70K salary, but instead effectively pays taxes on two salaries of 35K instead, which is a lot less tax in a progressive income tax system (about five thousand dollars less – a third of his tax bill). That’s a good deal for that family. It’s a lot less impressive for, say, a family earning 90K, divided between one earner making 60K and a second making 30K: their total tax burden goes from roughly $16K to roughly $15K. (It’s also a tax policy that benefits especially wealthy earners, not that this comes as a surprise: it’s essentially regressive.)

But what bothers me most is that a policy claimed as “pro-family” isn’t, not really, because income splitting is a policy that doesn’t have anything to do with raising a family: it has to do with marriage. Childless married couples get income splitting just like childrearing families do, and if there’s any reason for the government to promote marriage through tax policy, it is to create stable homes for children. Income splitting doesn’t do that: it just gives married people money. There are all sorts of policy options on the table for assisting families if you want to give them money that can do it in a more direct and equitable manner: baby bonuses, tax credits related to childrearing, paid parental leave, et cetera.

But the Tories didn’t push those: they pushed a policy that would only really help those families that, let’s be honest, Tories approve of, and they glibly suggested that it would help other families become more like traditional single-earner families (which it won’t, because the tax break can almost never compensate for the loss of a salary, even with the gains of having a full-time homemaker present). It’s a bad policy, and only the first of many the Conservatives will push through now that they have a majority.

It’s simple, kiddo. I got a heist planned that’s gonna be…oh, it’s gonna be big. The biggest of the big. Don’t think millions, think billions. And the best part is, the people we’re stealing from? They won’t be able to do a thing about it. It’s gonna be all nice and legal.

Think about all them widows and orphans out there, my friend. All those retirees, all those teachers in their boring little-person jobs, all the cops and firefighters. Sure, I know what you’re thinking. “Where’s the upside in stealing the Social Security check of some little old lady? How much is that gonna get us?” That’s why you need me, pal. Because you don’t think big. We’re not going to steal one check from one little old lady. We’re gonna steal ’em all. All at once.

See, here’s the plan. I’m gonna make you my guy on the inside, see. Because you’re not too sharp…hey, don’t look at me like that, we both know it. But you got a nice smile, you got good hair, you look good in a suit. Respectable, that’s the word. That’s why you’re gonna be the front man in this. I’ll provide the seed money, you wrap yourself in the flag, Mom, apple pie, all that jazz. Talk a lot about how you love babies and hate taxes, that’ll get the mark interested. Before you know it, you’re a big man in Washington.

That’s when we get to work. See, all these suckers we’re going after, they think they got a contract. But this is the best part: There ain’t a word of it that can’t be changed! It’s all what they call a “social contract”, a bunch of people getting together and agreeing on what needs to be done for the good of the whole country. Man, these chumps ain’t gonna know what hit ’em.

Because they put all their money in this “America” thing. For safekeeping, right? They got sold this line that if they give money to the government, someday they’ll get it back in the form of essential services. Oh, sure, the people who told ’em that meant it. But remember, it’s a social contract. Someone like…well, like you and me…we get in charge of the money, we can just change the rules however we want.

So you tell the mark, “Hey, elect me and I’ll make sure you get a better deal. All the stuff you’re getting now, but you won’t have to pay so much in taxes!” And then you get into office, and the first thing you do? You make sure I get paid. Don’t worry, you’ll get your cut. We’ll call my money a “subsidy”, and your money a “campaign contribution.” All nice and legal, like I said.

Then we show the marks the books. We say, “Hey, somebody must have made a mistake. All those things we promised to give you? All those things you been paying for your whole life? Yeah, sorry, there’s not enough money in the budget for ’em. That guy who was in charge before me, he must have been lying to you when he said we could do that. What a punk, huh? We’re gonna have to cut all those fancy benefits. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Every single dime those chumps and suckers paid into creating this “American Dream” of theirs, right into our pockets. A lot of ’em won’t even suspect a thing! And the ones who do, well…like I said, there’s nothing illegal about it. You just subsidized my company. I just contributed to your campaign. They just made some sacrifices for our nation’s future. Hell, we’re all goddamn patriots.

It’s a nice, simple scam. I end up richer, you end up richer, and the only people who get hurt are a bunch of little people who trusted in this country’s leaders to do right by them the way they did right by America. And most of them will probably wind up convincing themselves it was all their fault somehow for believing in the American Dream. It sounds too good to be true, right? A society where people come together to do things that are too big for them to do separately? A nation where people don’t leave the sick, the poor, the elderly and the helpless to die? Yeah, suckers probably have it coming just for trying crap like that with people like us around.

So whaddya say? You in? Or do I find someone else to be my inside guy and rake in the dough?

Yeah, that’s about what I thought.

Discussion of this Ebert essay is spreading around the internets because that is what the internets do, and the trope I’m hearing most regularly is the old canard of “well poor people are willing to support policy positions that benefit rich people because they think they might get rich some day.”

This is crap and has been crap for a very long time: it rests on the assumption that poor people are stupid and don’t realize how unlikely they are to become rich. I talk to these sorts of people frequently, and I think poor people who vote for policies that benefit rich people generally know exactly how unlikely they are to become rich. That’s not why these people support [insert policy here that screws them and helps rich people].

Instead, I think it’s generally because the elites who want these policies enacted have very successfully communicated their ideas in terms of basic fairness. “It’s not fair that I worked hard for all this money and when I die I have to pay estate taxes and my children won’t get everything they deserve.” “It’s not fair that my company has to pay more tax than an equivalent company in Somewhere Else.” “It’s not fair that I should pay a higher income tax rate than someone else just because I make more money.” “It’s not fair that you should be forced to buy health insurance if you don’t want to.”

That these positions are frequently disingenuous is besides the point: the point was to make these terribly unfair policies appear fair, because the voters who come out to support them really do value the concept of fairness more often than not, and if you can demonstrate that a policy they support is basically not fair then gradually they will change their minds.1 When liberals natter about how non-rich conservative voters are voting against their interest because of some cynical hope that one day they’ll benefit from it, all they’re doing is engaging in cariacature, mostly because it’s satisfying to portray political opponents as idiots2 but ultimately it just feels like an excuse: if you want to get people to endorse policies that are truly egalitarian rather than ones that only pretend to be that, you have to put in the groundwork.

1. See the steadily growing support for same-sex marriage, for example, which is tracking support for gays in the military by about six years behind but at the same pace. [↩]
2. God knows I do it often enough. [↩]

My election aftermath post is up at Torontoist.

Also, I don’t think Harper and the Tories will make dramatic shifts to the right on social policy: I genuinely don’t think they’re that stupid, and I suspect if they tried there are enough newly minted Tory MPs that would break ranks (and Layton is smart enough to get them to do it), because regardless of party unity the public would be 90% against, say, banning same-sex marriage or criminalizing abortion. But they’re definitely going to bring in some horrible fiscal policies (income splitting, for example), and destroy a lot of effective government regulation, and let industry write laws benefiting them (man, the telecoms in this country are so happy today) and nothing’s gonna stop that.

I’m liveblogging the federal election results tonight with the rest of the Crack Torontoist Election Team Central Brigade here.